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Puzzle Puppers is the dog-based puzzle game of your dreams

 

 

Earlier today, we came across Puzzle Puppers, an adorable game reminiscent of Stephen’s Sausage Roll and Push Me Pull You. The game combines the grid-based puzzle solving of the former, while adding the adorably stretchy dogs of the latter. 

The premise is simple enough: In each puzzle, you’ll have one or more puppers and you need to stretch their bodies to their color-coded food bowl. Along the way, there are optional hams you can collect to increase the difficulty of the puzzles. As long as your puppers get to their bowl, you’ll solve the puzzle, but completionists will want to get all the hams too, which will give you more hearts. The amount of hearts you get will allow you to unlock more stages.

The game features 80 puzzles, but without the crushing difficulty of Stephen’s Sausage Roll. While you might find yourself scratching your head every few puzzles, the mechanics are simple enough that the solution shouldn’t be too hard to crack.

We made it a quarter of the way through the puzzles and were greeted with a handful of new mechanics that freshen up the gameplay. Eventually you’ll send your puppers through holes and through rivers on your quest to reach those elusive dog bowls — and hams.

Since we picked up the game on iPad, it wasn’t long until we were passing it around to everyone in the New York office. There’s something about solving puzzles with puppers that is so irresistible. Once each new player got their hands on these pups, they eventually got lost in this ham-filled puzzle paradise.

Stellar: Galaxy Commander is a PVP Puzzle Game by Candy Crush Developer King 

Stellar: Galaxy Commander is King's next midcore match-three soft launch, this time combining strategy and space combat with the kind of colorful puzzles seen in something like Candy Crush Saga. This is King's second soft launch puzzle game with a focus on gamers as well as casual players, after Legend of Solgard. Both may be puzzle games, but Stellar is aiming more for a Clash Royale style of PVP gameplay and progression structure.

 Stellar pits two ship commanders in battle against each other on dueling puzzle boards in space. Each player gets two moves per turn, where they can play a set of atom ships on the board, launching up from the bottom to the game board, while spinning the pieces horizontally or vertically. The pieces work like Puyo Puyo with gravity pointing upward, and the atoms can separate and fall apart when put in play. It is also possible to remove an atom ship from play, but this costs a turn.

Attacks commence after both players make their moves. Atom ships will only attack if three of them are in contact with one another. They will shoot upward through their column, hitting ships in the way, with the goal of hitting the enemy character ship on the other side. The goal is to place ships and matches in such a way to protect from damage while dealing it out.

 

There are special ships that can help on offense and defense. Matches of four ships will form what are known as Melds. A vertical line of four will form a Beamer Meld, a ship that shoots a powerful shot upward through a single column. A two by two match will form a Bomber Meld, which does powerful wide shots. A horizontal line of four ships forms a Reflector Meld, which can serve as a shield against enemy shots. The offensive melds only last for one turn. The ships that form the meld disappear from the board.

Clash Royale's game structure influences Stellar: Galaxy Commander, as the different ships are upgradeable through card packs. Right now, only the four colors of single atom ships and the three classes of meld ships (one for each color) feature upgrades. Different heroes with special abilities are also available, and they feature upgrades via cards as well.

Stellar is unlike Legend of Solgard in that it features PVP combat as a core part of the game. While there is a single player campaign to Stellar, competing against other players in puzzle battles is the focus, instead of the PVE focus of King's other soft launch puzzle game.

King's Stellar: Galaxy Commander is a bit easier to download right now than Legend of Solgard, as it is on the App Store as well as Google Play, but only in the Netherlands and Indonesia.



Mess With Your Subjects In Royal Puzzle Game Kingscape

A lonely, bored prince creates adventures for himself within the confines of his castle, turning animals, servants, and his subjects into sources of adventure and puzzles in Kingscape.

Kingscape’s prince isn’t quite strong enough for combat, so much of his battles with the people around him will involve setting up chain reactions where his enemies will do the work. Players will move around a grid in turn-based puzzles, positioning themselves in order to knock enemies into one another, force them into fighting each other, or setting off their abilities so that they harm the foes around them.

It isn’t just a matter of positioning as well. Players will also have a deck of items that will let them create different effects in the field, such as soap that forces foes to slide on contact, a staff that makes panels sticky, and a hedgehog-launching slingshot. 

Creative players who wish to create more puzzles for themselves and others can also create more difficult situations for the prince using an in-game level editor.

Kingscape is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, and expects to release sometime in 2018.

Review: Levels+: Addictive Puzzle Game

In videogames there is a very fine line between taking inspiration from what has come before and outright stealing an idea and disguising it as your own. The latter hinges on watching somebody catch lightning in a bottle and hoping you can snag a piece for yourself; the former is constructively looking at somebody else’s design and adding your own unique twist to the formula. Even if a game isn’t blatantly a clone of something else, the perception will still lie there if the iteration isn’t strong enough.

There’s no denying that Levels +: Addictive Puzzle Game is unabashedly inspired by mobile hit Threes!. Fortunately, there’s also no denying that it takes the core mechanic and turns it into something that stands on its own and lives up to its subtitle in the process.

Much like in Threes! your goal in Levels+ is to match similar numbers to then make larger numbers in what could be an infinite loop towards toppling a high score. Whereas Threes! just has the player cascading tiles until they can no longer do so, Levels+ has a hierarchy to which you must be mindful of to keep the game going. At its base are yellow tiles which are denoted as treasure; these  are key to scoring. You could grab a 1 coin tile for a point, but adding them together multiplies the scoring potential and thus levitates you towards a top tier ranking.

In order to collect said treasure you must likewise combine blue tiles, which look very similar to various types of heroes, in a similarly ascending manner. A level 3 hero can collect anything at or below its rank, but nothing above it. Just to add one more level of complexity to the proceedings there are also red enemy tiles that will block your moves unless your blue tiles are of a level that is at or above the red tile.

While hard to explain in writing, this is actually very easy to pick up after its short tutorial but blossoms into something thoroughly thought-provoking the deeper you dig into its rule set. Being as there's only one mode of play, the motivation is in mastery of what's on offer. You can casually slide tiles around in a more passive manner or plan out each move thanks to being shown what the next tile will be, in something more akin to the intricacy of chess. Regardless of your approach, the odds are you’ll have a blast playing it.

Although its presentation is straightforward, the tiles pop with clever artwork that drives home the adventurer aesthetic that gives it a lot more style than first appears. The music is a catchy chip tune that will layer on new parts as you create bigger tiles that ramp up the tension, in the hopes of perhaps making players stumble into a hasty move. Rounding out the feature set is the game’s auto-save function that lets you pick up where you left off even if you move onto something else, the ability to use the touch screen or buttons to your preference as well as a handful of achievements to strive for and a panel collection page to fill. The only thing that feels like it is missing is an online leaderboard or cross-profile score sharing of any sort, meaning that it truly is one core mode and lacking the sorts of add-ons we often see in puzzle titles.

Conclusion

While Threes! in and of itself was a phenomenon, Levels+: Addictive Puzzle Game not only iterates on the formula in its own unique way but makes it feel like a perfect fit for the Switch. While it is missing some pertinent bells and whistles, like being able to compete against others on any type of leaderboard beyond water cooler talk, what is presented is rock solid and worth your time.

Puzzle Game 'Yankai's Triangle' Available for Free as Apple's App of the Week

 Puzzle game Yankai's Triangle was named Apple's App of the Week, making it free to download for the next seven days. This is the first time the game has been made available for free since it was released in November of 2016. 

 

Yankai's Triangle is, as the name suggests, a puzzle game based on triangles. The idea is to tap on different colored triangles to rotate them into a triangle shape to solve puzzles. From the App Store Editors: 

This deceptively simple puzzle game is pure Pythagorean pleasure. Rotating multicolored triangular puzzle pieces to snap them together with their mates is dead simple at first, but when layer after layer of triangles are in the mix, we truly come to respect the power of three. Bright hues and funny sound effects help seal the deal--you might even say it's very acute.

Yankai's Triangle features leaderboards, achievements, an option for colorblind players, a time-based scoring system, and no in-app purchases.